Another CEO: ‘Obama’s understanding of business is not there’ (The Michigan View 09.18.11)

Posted by hpayne on September 18, 2011

“The understanding of business is not there. The president has no business people around him. The fundamental understanding is not there.”

So said Conoco-Phillips CEO J.J. Mulva to The Detroit News editorial board this week – another of an extraordinary parade of American CEOs who say a major obstacle to their business today is Washington and its anti-business president.

While President Obama tours the country selling his American Jobs Act as the solution to 9.1 percent unemployment, he is ignoring the advice of the job creators: cut regulations and reform the tax code. As noted in MIView in recent weeks, our president is so divorced from business reality – so hostile to business – that CEOs from Home Depot to Boeing to Michigan’s Wee Discover Child Daycare feel compelled to speak out.

“I think we’re really hurting our economy,” said Mulva of the myriad of anti-energy regulations that have hampered growth of his industry, a major job producer. “People are starting to talk about it. (Washington) has been trying to accomplish with regulation what they couldn’t accomplish with legislation.”

Obama’s pet MSM has all but ignored this story. But it is everywhere.

Mulva says that Obamacare is stifling development in labor-heavy service industries, but that it is not a major concern in equipment-heavy energy manufacturing. Instead, Obama’s Green Church is costing his industry thousands of jobs and millions of dollars – in the middle of a recession! – with restrictive regulation and ideologically-driven foot-dragging that has hampered development of a transcontinental pipeline bringing oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Anti-Gulf production regulations have also cost “thousands of jobs in the region,” adds Mulva.

The White House’s anti-fossil fuel religion has also spread to Conoco’s natural gas fracking operations, with green NGOs attacking a new energy industry that is an untold American success story.

Think of the perversity of what Obama’s Green Church is doing here: While publicly calling for oil “independence,” it is strangling the production of domestic natural gas and oil from our Canadian ally.

The fracking story is particularly remarkable.

“In the 1980s we thought we were running out of natural gas,” says Mulva. “But thanks to new technologies, fracking has given us access to more than 100 years of reserves. This is no less than a modern industrial revolution.” So much for the green crystal ball predicting the demise of fossil fuel reserves.

While the MSM channels green claims that yesterday’s wind tech is the future of energy, in fact the new tech of fracking has made cheap energy more abundant than ever.

“We also face stiff political resistance to opening new areas of exploration. This despite the fact that the public favors expanded domestic energy development,” Mulva says. Lift the roadblocks and the CEO estimates another 1 million jobs could be created – raising $800 million in government revenue. “We are blessed to have this much gas.”

But we are cursed in having politicians committed to sacrificing this potential on the altar of global warming